Willard (known professionally as H. Willard), the son of William Henry Ortlip, was an artistically gifted and highly motivated child. Recognizing this, his father enrolled him at thirteen in a correspondence study offered by theChicago School of Illustration. Willard received thoughtful assignments and rigorous criticism, a careful preparation for his later achievement at thePennsylvania Academy of Fine Art(PAFA).
Daughter of a prosperous Philadelphia clothing manufacturer and his wife, Louis and Emma Israel Eschner, Aimée began study at thePennsylvania Academy of Fine Art(PAFA) in 1907. She studied numerous genres, ultimately settling on florals and landscapes.
Paul was the youngest of the seven offspring of H. Willard and Aimée Ortlip. Over the course of his prolific career, he maintained studios in Fort Lee NJ, Boca Raton FL, the Poconos, and eventually on Martha’s Vineyard. He set his course for art from childhood, shadowing his parents in the studio.
As a child William Henry Ortlip, the father of H. Willard Ortlip, dreamed of formal full-time study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art (PAFA), though he knew his family could not afford such training. He settled for commercial illustration and sign painting, and remained an amateur in portraiture and still life.
Along with H. Willard’s commissioned portraits and Aimée’s florals and still-lifes, the Ortlips accepted many commercial assignments. The Commercial Art Gallery is a sampling of their work.
The mural Redemption is located at Houghton University in western New York State, in the foyer of the John and Charles Wesley Chapel. Its design and much of its painting was by H. Willard Ortlip, assisted by Aimée E. Ortlip.
The Ortlip Family Art Trust (OFAT) exists to preserve and share the work of an extraordinary family of artists who painted throughout the twentieth century. The inherited and donated Ortlip Family Art Collection (OFAC) comprises more than 150 works by H. Willard and Aimée E. Ortlip and two of their daughters, along with hundreds more unframed oils, charcoals, pastels, watercolors, and drawings.
This teaching collection is archived and exhibited in the campus library at Houghton University. This website provides a sampling from the comprehensive Ortlip catalog of several thousand artworks in the database the Trust continues to build and maintain.
The Trust-owned OFAC is separate from the University’s own significant collection of nearly a hundred commissioned or donated Ortlip works. The OFAC features the work of the four Ortlip painters who served the art faculty over five decades of the twentieth century: Aileen Ortlip Shea, her sister Marjorie Ortlip Stockin, and their parents, H. Willard and Aimée E. Ortlip.